Detroit is a city with a pioneering musical spirit and a history that goes beyond the signature sound of Motown, from jazz to funk to techno. One organization that has worked to preserve that history got its start outside a building at 5021 Tireman Avenue.
It was there that in 2011, a group of Detroit music advocates met with a mission to preserve the Blue Bird Inn — a birthplace of bebop jazz in the 1940s and a working-class hearth for the Black community before Motown.
A year later, the group officially became the Detroit Sound Conservancy. Since then, the organization has worked to ensure that buildings like the Blue Bird Inn — which the group is rehabilitating — remain intact, along with the historic documents and stories behind Detroit’s sonic innovation.
For instance, the organization helped secure historic designation for the landmark United Sound Systems Recording Studio, where Parliament-Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, John Lee Hooker, and others laid down tracks. The group also helped restore the sound system for Club Heaven, the foremost Black LGBTQ-friendly dance music club in Detroit in the 1980s.
“The magic of this music and culture is that it is world-changing and monumental and also totally commonplace and what everybody experiences together,” says Jonah Raduns-Silverstein, DSC’s director of operations. “The [DSC] sort of comes out of that spirit and that lack of resources and lack of intention and lack of institutionality. This organization exists to preserve and advocate for Detroit music history.”
In 2014, the DSC was gifted Graystone International Jazz Museum owner James Jenkins’s extensive collections archiving the historic Graystone Ballroom, where thousands would cram in to see acts like Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers back in the 1940s. The following year, the DSC and a group of volunteers — led by founder and then-executive director Carleton Gholz — gathered materials from the ballroom’s promotional posters to its windows, which were stored in downtown Detroit’s Book Tower and a local warehouse. The acquisition marked the beginning of the conservancy’s effort to salvage pieces of Detroit’s music history.
The historic WGPR 107.5 FM building, home of Michigan’s first Black-owned FM radio station, now houses the archives. The DSC’s staff of three works to organize stacks of boxes filled with photos, flyers advertising Detroit techno raves, news clippings, and master tapes of everything from the Evil Dead score to artists like Glen Campbell, Burt Bacharach, Isaac Hayes, Styx, Quincy Jones, and Cab Calloway recorded by legendary United Sound recording engineer Ed Wolfrum. The conservancy has also added oral histories to its list of archival responsibilities over the years, documenting the stories of artists like Don Was and topics like women in jazz.
“I think what we have come to realize is this work necessitates working with people and artists and creators while they are still with us,” Raduns-Silverstein says.
Established on four pillars — placekeeping, preservation, education, and celebration — the conservancy has worked to keep alive some of Detroit’s most treasured locales for music innovation. That includes United Sound Systems, where the nonprofit’s years of advocacy ensured that the studio remained standing amid the potential threat of construction along I-94.
The DSC’s largest looming project is its transformation of the Blue Bird Inn, which the organization acquired in 2019 with the help of a Kresge Foundation grant. The DSC plans to rehabilitate it into a music venue, gathering space, and home of Detroit’s only music archive.
After fixing the venue’s roof and foundation, the DSC plans to rebuild and reinstall the stage, Raduns-Silverstein says. The nonprofit hopes to take occupancy in the renovated Bluebird Inn sometime in 2026. Work continues on a new two-story addition to the back of the building, which will hold the DSC’s archives. The DSC has also purchased eight adjacent lots along Beechwood Street that it plans to develop into a park to accommodate future performances, Raduns-Silverstein says.
Housing its collections in a venue that once hosted artists like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Elvin Jones is special to DSC director and director of collections Michelle Jahra McKinney, who believes the updated Blue Bird space will attract a new generation of music enthusiasts.
“That’s where a lot of culture, a lot of mentorship, a lot of transfer of the passing of the torch happened in that little neighborhood place,” Jahra McKinney says. “I just love the idea of a front porch where we could have gatherings, and the children could just sit right up under the jazz musicians while they’re playing.”
Read more about DSC’s fundraising efforts for the restoration of the Blue Bird Inn at detroitsound.org/give/bird.
This story originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
